New Saudi Visa Requirement: Ugliness!

It’s too good to check, and anyway if it’s wrong it’s the Telegraph‘s gaffe, so I’m going to analyze its deeper meaning. The story’s fairly straightforward, given the wackiness of the “culture” in the Muslim world (yes, the same Muslim world that President Obama approached in Cairo in the conviction that he would forge a new world order with them): there’s a big celebration in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s called the Jenadrivah Heritage and Culture Festival. Lots of people from all over the region are there. All of a sudden, the Religious Police, charged with protecting the Kingdom from sin, march into the stands and arrest three men, visitors from the United Arab Emirates.

Their crime? “They are too handsome.”

Their punishment? Expulsion. Shipped off to Abu Dhabi, where handsome is still permitted.

A bit of detail for the curious. The police, members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices, feared female visitors could fall for them.”

Let’s put this story on Freud’s couch (which, by the way, still exists in his home in Vienna. But I digress). Note that the defenders of virtue aren’t protecting Saudi women, but foreigners. The implication being that Saudi females aren’t as easily compromised, even by handsome rogues. Indeed, there was at least one foreign woman present, an “artist” from the UAE who, we are told by a spokesman from the Emirates, wasn’t part of the official delegation. So the Religious Police were making sure that those lascivious foreigners didn’t have any chance for hanky panky.

Fair enough. Rules are rules, after all, and virtue has to be upheld. But, as Freud would say, there’s a rich undercurrent beneath those rules. First is the celebrated misogyny of the Islamic states. Women are wrapped up, head to ankle, and the presumption is that if they could be seen, they’d corrupt the men. So they can’t be seen, they can’t be let out alone, they can’t be in the presence of a man-not-a-member-of-her-immediate-family (i.e., they have to be chaperoned if her husband-lord-and-master isn’t there). They’re sinful and irresistible and left to their own devices they will drag the men down into a cesspool of lust.

Second, the men have to be protected from them. The consequence is sexual repression on a scale we cannot begin to imagine. I’ve long believed that at least some jihadi terrorism is the result of the strict segregation of the sexes. Young men cannot meet young women, and cannot engage in, uh, sinful behavior with the opposite sex until they marry. Think about those grim religious schools, the madrasas, thousands of which are funded by Saudi money and operated all over the world. Those adolescent boys sit on hard floors and endure hour after hour of religious indoctrination, while their libidos pump them full of dreams and desires…desires that can be fulfilled instantly if they will martyr themselves (72 virgins, etc etc).

FWIW, in the 70's I worked in the merchant fleet in and out of the middle east. The more ambitious members of the crew made a little money selling Playboy and Penthouse magazines to the Muslim dockworkers.One of the stevedores spoke fairly good English and explained to us, over an illegal beer or two from Bahrain, that the Saudi Bedouins (now in RV's) made excellent money driving into NW Saudi Arabia and taping Israeli late night TV (after a certain time each night, in the 70's, Israeli TV allowed what we would call X rated movies and shows, frontal nudity and sexy language) for sale down kingdom. The funny part; the Ministry of Vice and Virtue wanted to stop this, so each night the power system in NW Saudi was shut down.The run on Honda generators doubled their retail price for weeks. What a hoot.

And yes, as noted below, in both the 70's and my return in the 90's confirmed, homosexuality is one of the many dirty secrets of Islam.

I've often thought that Islam's demand that women cover themselves from head-to-toe was an insult to all Islamic men. These men have so little self control that if they saw a woman's bare leg or belly button, bare shoulder or neck, it would drive these devout men into a frenzy of lust and this bare woman would find herself even more bare and in the middle of a gang rape.

Dr. Ledeen writes: "It doesn’t take a great psychoanalyst to spot an inferiority complex at work. The protectors of virtue secretly believe that they and their fellow countrymen aren’t nearly as handsome as the beaux from Abu Dhabi."

Isn't this a remarkable parallel with paranoia about a book? Smuggling a Bible inside Saudi Arabia is a high crime. Are they afraid that the wisdom of their sacred book is not as desirable as that conveyed by another book? Institutionalized jealousy anyone?

if you want to know with whom we are dealing look at the documentary film on the hostage taking, premeditated bombing and murders of leaving no little schoolchildren alive. these are monsters. they're here. and they're muslims.

FWIW, in the 70's I worked in the merchant fleet in and out of the middle east. The more ambitious members of the crew made a little money selling Playboy and Penthouse magazines to the Muslim dockworkers.One of the stevedores spoke fairly good English and explained to us, over an illegal beer or two from Bahrain, that the Saudi Bedouins (now in RV's) made excellent money driving into NW Saudi Arabia and taping Israeli late night TV (after a certain time each night, in the 70's, Israeli TV allowed what we would call X rated movies and shows, frontal nudity and sexy language) for sale down kingdom. The funny part; the Ministry of Vice and Virtue wanted to stop this, so each night the power system in NW Saudi was shut down.The run on Honda generators doubled their retail price for weeks. What a hoot.

And yes, as noted below, in both the 70's and my return in the 90's confirmed, homosexuality is one of the many dirty secrets of Islam.

The uglier they are, the more support and affection they garner among decadent Westerners that who perversely sympathize with homicidal grotesques. Consider the wildly popular terrorist leader Yasir Arafat.

There may be another reason these men were expelled for their good looks by The Vice Patrol, or whatever they're called, and that is the assumption that many overly handsome men are homosexuals. They may have been afraid that Saudi boys would be corrupted. Either way, it's very creepy, but making an assessment of a person on the basis of their physical beauty isn't unknown here or anywhere else. It's always unfair.